Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Jackie Finds Gold In Chris Cleave's Latest Book

What would you sacrifice for the people you love?

Kate and Zoe met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national
training program in track cycling—a sport that demands intense focus,
blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit
the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals,
all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that
separates triumph from despair.

Now at thirty-two, the women are
facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants
desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Kate
is the more naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a
tendency to slow her down. Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie dreams of
the Death Star and of battling alongside the Rebels as evil white blood
cells ravage her personal galaxy—she is fighting a recurrence of the
leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago. Sophie doesn’t want to
stand in the way of her mum’s Olympic dreams, but each day the dark
forces of the universe seem to be massing against her.

Devoted
and self-sacrificing Kate knows her daughter is fragile, but at the
height of her last frenzied months of training, might she be blind to
the most terrible prognosis?

Intense, aloof Zoe has always
hovered on the periphery of real human companionship, and her compulsive
need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship
with Kate—and her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the
advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond
they have shared for more than a decade?

Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track, Gold is
a triumph of superbly paced, heart-in-throat storytelling. With great
humanity and glorious prose, Chris Cleave examines the values that lie
at the heart of our most intimate relationships, and the choices we make
when lives are at stake and everything is on the line.

Jackie says:"This is the story to three top athletes, bike racers on the Olympic level, and what drives them. This isn't really a sports story, though you do learn a great deal about the grueling training that these folks willingly endure. It's about team mates who are sometimes friends and other times not, with a complicated past and an even more complicated present. It's about parenthood, relationships, priorities and the sacrifices that are made for love, or fear. It's about celebrity and intimacy, of the trials of competition on your head and heart, and about figuring out who you are and remaining true to that. As the story unfolds the reader is slowly given access to these three people's histories and mysteries and has a front row seat for their fight for the future that runs through a gauntlet of emotions that will not leave that reader untouched. More simply, this is a marvelous and enveloping read."